Moving beyond women's career choices: Factors associated with career continuity among female former art students

Abstract

In 1987, Betz and Fitzgerald identified four general categories (individual, educational, background and adult lifestyle) and 17 specific components therein that facilitated women's career choices. They noted, for instance, that a combination of variables such as high ability and high self esteem (individual), as well as a working mother and early work experience (background), higher education (educational) combined with no marriage and no or few children (adult lifestyle), constituted several of the critical influences acting on a woman's selection of a career.The factors identified by Betz and Fitzgerald are certainly important for advising women who are making career choices. However, the career counseling discipline appears ready (Harmon & Farmer, 1983) to move beyond issues of career choice and face its next challenge. That challenge revolves around the issue of career continuity (i.e., career patterns over time). At this time, knowledge of the factors that sustain careers may be more central to refining and extending our models of women's careers than knowing which factors facilitate choice.One way to meet this challenge is to assess the usefulness of the variables in the Betz and Fitzgerald model in regard to career continuity. The present study examines career patterns in relation to particular aspects of the model's individual, background and the adult lifestyle categories.

Who Goes Freelance? The Determinants of Self-Employment for Artists

“…6 Within the small set of empirical studies on artists exists an even smaller set of studies on artists' employment decisions. The employment decision of an artist has typically been modeled as an input to other types of labor outcomes, such as earnings (Wassall & Alper, 1992), occupational persistence (Stohs, 1991a(Stohs, , 1991b, and work hours (Robinson & Montgomery, 2000) via a traditional labor supply model. In general, these studies have found that not only is there great variability in artists' incomes, but also that the return on education is lower than in other occupations with otherwise similar characteristics (Filer, 1990).…”

Annual Review: Practice and Research in Career Counseling and Development, 1991

“…In the former study, he developed predictions of the first, best, and last contributions based on individual differences and contrasts across scientific disciplines. The correlates of whether artists' careers were continuous or interrupted during 18 years following art school were studied by Stohs (1991). She found large gender differences in continuity (women had more interrupted careers) and that, among women, several background indicators (e.g., mother's job) and adult life-style indicators (e.g., number of children, number of exhibits) did discriminate.…”